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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and the rest, asked for no propagandists. They did not require explaining. Surely now Wagner is in imminent danger of being over-explained. At any rate, students are allowed to discover little for themselves, for their ' teachers' must, at the present rate, exhaust the subject. 'The only intelligible history of music should be taught by means of correct and beautiful performances of classical works,' said Wagner. May we not then say, for pity's sake let us hear more of Wagner's music, and arrange a close season for books explanatory of it and its author's history, books which describe the man, his clothes, his methods, his theories—in fact, all that is his." So "the rest" asked for no propagandists, did they not? As to "asking," what has that to do with it ? Did Beethoven ask Herr Carl Reinecke to write those explanations of his sonatas which appeared lately in The Monthly Musical Record, or did he ask Sir George Grove to write his book on the nine symphonies, or Signor Colombani to write his on the same subject ? But this " rest" puzzles me considerably. Go into a library, and look at the books on Job, Buddha, Christ, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, St. Paul, Plato, Mohammed, Dante, Calderon, Shakespeare, Kant, Burns, Hegel, Byron, Ibsen, and so on—as manymore as ever you like. What about them ? Have the books and articles written on these men and their views called forth a demand from the Times, for " pity's sake," to hear (or read) more of such works, and arrange a close season explanatory of them and their author's history, etc.? Again, the writer forgets that three-fourths of Wagnerian explanation consists in refutations of the grossest misrepresentations that ever accumulated about a man. Why not, " for pity's sake," cry out, in the first instan...